Smells Like Teen Spirit
by Shannon the Twisted Link Worshiper

(x) X (x)

Game 6
Sticky Fingers

(x) X (x)

Noin had a pretty good guess as to where Quatre had probably gone. Upon leaving the garage, she started for Gifford’s, the popular little ice cream joint on the boardwalk that overlooked the beach. After about ten minutes of walking, she had reached the place, a low contemporary white building with a large ice cream cone made of various sheets of flat coloured metal sticking out of the side, built up to lean a little out over the boardwalk. Soon she was pushing open the glass door of the little scoop shop, whose bell jangled merrily as she did so, and walking over towards a little table in the corner, near one of the large windows at the front of the building. It was there that she found her little blonde friend staring dejectedly outside as he forlornly licked at a huge double-scoop cone that dripped over his slender fingers in sticky blobs.

“You okay?” the tall purple haired girl asked as she pulled out the other chair at the table and sat down.

“Sure,” Quatre shrugged, slurping at a puddle of strawberry ice cream that had accumulated on the back of his knuckles. He glanced up at her over the large globe of pink ice cream that sat nestled inside the crunchy cone with large aquamarine eyes. “You don’t have to try and console me ‘cause I’m the little guy,” he commented before Noin had a chance to open her mouth again, knowing exactly why she had come, Sense or no. “I can take care of myself just fine, thanks.”

“Is it such a crime to worry about friends?” she asked, leaning on the shiny tin-hued table. “You looked really upset when Duo said all those things about your other friends.”

“Well yeah,” Quatre answered with a sigh, pausing to lap at his ice cream again before elaborating. “I mean, why do I have to choose my friends according to his tastes? He’s always so judgmental about people he thinks won’t understand.”

“He’s just worried about you, that’s all,” Noin said, reaching across the table to pat Quatre’s hand and, more importantly, to steal a finger-full of dripping strawberry ice cream. “Mm, Gifford’s is the best,” she said with a delicious sigh as she sucked her finger. Looking up again, she said, “But really, Q, you can’t blame Duo for always being so suspicious of the mainstream crowd. He’s not had very good experiences with regular people and his mutation….”

“Well if he could just keep it under control, he wouldn’t have to worry about people he doesn’t trust finding out!” Quatre protested in an agitated tone, referring to Duo’s tendency to let inhibitions in his emotions to take control of his teleporting. Another noisy breath fell from his lips as he added, “He complains that people won’t understand what it’s like to be a rebel and a mutant, but sometimes I think it’s him who’s not understanding.”

“That may very well be, but Duo does have reasons for being the way he is, and you can’t prosecute him on account of things that have happened in his past,” Noin said tactfully in Duo’s defense. “He just doesn’t want to see the same thing happen to his best friend in the whole world.” She smiled warmly at her friend, who seemed to perk up a little at the gesture.

“I appreciate it, I really do,” Quatre responded, offering Noin a bit of his ice cream. “But I like Trowa. I’ve only spoken to him a few times, and even though he’s just an ordinary human, I still think that we’d be good friends, just like I’m good friends with you. Duo has no right to get angry at me just because he doesn’t like the fact that I want to spend time with a lacrosse player. You and I both know that it’s more that then anything.”

“Very true,” Noin agreed with a wholehearted nod as she accepted Quatre’s proffered ice cream cone and started taking large bites out of the pink mass. “I guess there are some things that can’t be taught. If this Trowa turns out to be the way Duo thinks, well good for him, he was right, but at least you would have learned it on your own, and that teaches more than listening to Duo rail on about the horrors of mainstream society.”

Suddenly the tinkling clang of the bell hanging over the door interrupted the conversation, inviting in none other than the topic of their conversation and his walking mystery of a friend toting their lacrosse sticks into the ice cream shop. The pair sitting at the table spied furtively as Trowa and Heero walked up to the counter, Trowa ordering a single scoop of coconut ice-cream in a sugar cone, Heero requesting his ‘usual’, which appeared to be no more than a simple vanilla milkshake. As Heero was paying for both treats at the register, Trowa looked over his shoulder and noticed Quatre and Noin by the window, watching them as they shared a large glob of slowly melting strawberry ice cream in a huge waffle cone. He smiled and waved at them, tugging Heero by the sleeve in their direction as soon as he had finished the transaction.

“Hello,” he smiled, dragging a chair from another table to the little round one by the window, discarding the pair of short attacker’s lacrosse sticks beside the table in a messy heap. “We just keep running into each other, don’t we?” he said as he dove into his still ice-cold sphere of frozen white cream atop the small sugar cone.

Quatre beamed in response, reveling in the balmy waves of emotion dancing around in Trowa’s aura before speaking. “So we do.”

Heero was leaning against the nearby wall as he sipped on his shake, his free hand pressed between the small of his back and the white plaster behind him, icy Prussian eyes focused intently on the table beside him, wordless as usual. Though Trowa seemed at ease with the blonde and his friend, Heero had trouble talking around people he was not used to, which pretty much included everyone in the world except for Trowa. And since Trowa seemed to be so fond of this blonde and genuinely wanted to get to know him better, he elected that it would be safer just to keep his mouth shut, lest he say something that jeopardized their potential friendship.

“So who’s this?” Trowa was saying, looking up at Noin with a timid smile.
Quatre got a flash of nervous energy from Trowa’s aura and wondered briefly what it was about. “Oh, this is Lucrezia Noin,” Quatre introduced the purple-haired girl, who was nursing the half-eaten strawberry cone beside him with a gesture of his hand. “But we just all call her Noin. She’s a very good friend of mine.”

“You girlfriend?” Trowa asked almost too quickly. From his spot on the wall, Heero rolled his eyes, deciding that Trowa had lost all sense of tact and poise in a matter of seconds, finding the question utterly ridiculous.

“No, no,” Noin said with a shake of her head and a whirl of the ice cream. She handed the cone back to Quatre, who took to finishing it off with passion. “Just friends out for ice cream.”

“Huh, that’s cool,” Trowa answered, sounded extremely relieved. Heero rolled his eyes behind Trowa’s back again, though this time Quatre caught the gesture and arched a quizzical eyebrow at him. The blonde boy was still unable to detect any emotions in the boy and wondered if there was something wrong with his Sense or if there was something about Heero that needed explaining. He had little time to think any more on it, for Trowa was talking again. “So what’s the occasion?”

“Splurge,” Quatre said simply, a frown crossing his light rosy lips at the thought of the disagreement he had with Duo.

“Duo and Q just had a big fight,” Noin explained to Trowa sympathetically. “Q told Duo to fuck off because he was being a pigheaded jackass.”

“Well that figures,” Heero snorted with a low chuckle, drawing the attention of all three at the table, though the dark haired Japanese boy said nothing more after that and returned to suckling the clear straw of his milkshake, staring blankly across the scoop shop.

“What’d you fight about?” Trowa asked in a kind voice, hoping to make the blonde boy feel better.

“It’s… complicated….” Quatre sighed, munching the tapered end of the cone from between his sticky fingers. Though Quatre did feel comfortable around Trowa, he still did not feel close enough to him that he should let him in on the little secret his friends and he all shared, or even if he should ever let him in on it at all. Even though Duo was shamelessly pounding on Trowa and his friend, he had to admit that the braided mechanic did have a pretty legit point about being careful about who he told about his Sense. “You kind of have to know Duo… really well to get it.”

“I see,” Trowa hummed, leaning back in his chair and returning to work on his ice cream. Silence reigned around the little group as each mulled over their own thoughts, trying to figure out what to say or do next. After about ten minutes of quiet pondering and ice cream licking, Noin spoke up, wondering what time it was as she had a date with Milliardo that evening. Trowa glanced down at his watch to check for her and exclaimed, “Holy shit, check the time!” He snarfed the rest of his ice cream in two huge bites and turned around in his chair, saying to his companion, “Hey Heero, we’ve got to roll. Mom and Dad are coming home tonight and if I don’t get home soon, Catherine’s gonna try cooking—you don’t need me to tell you that would be a guaranteed disaster.”

Heero nodded as he took that final slurp of his milkshake that never failed to be loud and musical, not saying a word as he effortlessly tossed the empty cup across the ice cream parlor and nailed the trashcan, making a perfect basket with nothing but net so to speak. He stooped and picked up their discarded lacrosse sticks and was practically out the door before Trowa even had time to stand up.

“Hey Quatre,” Trowa said as he returned his chair to the other table he had stolen it from, fishing around in his pocket for his car key. When he had the blonde’s attention, he offered with a faint smile, “Do you and Miss Noin there need a ride?” His face became apologetic as he addressed Noin. “Sorry,” he said with a tiny shrug, “I just can’t bring myself call a lady by only her last name, no matter how tough she is.”

Noin looked a little miffed as she tried to argue, “There’s no gender in—”

“Among friends, yeah, I agree,” Trowa cut her off, his smile now more of a smirk as he twirled his key around his finger on its ring. “But I’m afraid that it would be rude of me to be so casual before I know you well.” He chanced a quick quirk of his lips at Quatre as he finished. “Though I am very sure that if you are a good friend of Quatre’s, then you will soon be a good friend of mine as well. But still….”

Noin giggled in response, furtively elbowing Quatre hard in the ribs beneath the table. Said blonde boy jumped in shock and quickly babbled a response to Trowa’s previous proposal. “Yeah, a ride would be great!”

“Cool,” Trowa’s grin was so much wider than he was used to pulling, it hurt his lips and cheeks somewhat. “The jeep’s parked right off the boardwalk here,” he said, pointing in the general direction of the street he was talking about. “It’s not far.”
The sun had already begun its western descent when they walked outside, illustrating how much time they had spent in the ice cream shop. They followed Trowa out of Gifford’s and down the boardwalk a little before turning off of the wooden promenade and heading a little ways down one of the little side streets that ran right up to the beach. Heero had already thrown the lacrosse sticks into the back and was waiting impatiently in the passenger’s seat, feet kicked up on the dashboard, arms crossed over his chest as his eyes watched with irritation for their approach.

“What happened to wanting to get home so damn quick?” Heero commented drolly, dropping his feet into a standard sitting position as Trowa opened the door on the driver’s side of the car, pulling the seat forward to allow Noin and Quatre access to the back.

“I’m not about to just leave them here to walk home in the dark, and Noin says she has to get to her boyfriend’s house really soon,” Trowa explained, throwing his head in and upward motion towards the hastily setting sun in the purplish sky above. He replaced the seat back and clambered into the car, slamming the door with his left hand and shoving his key into the ignition with his right, turning the creaky old jeep on with a twist of his hand. “Besides, knowing Cathy, if there’s no one there to cook for her, she’ll put off doing work until the absolute last minute. She’ll just want to look like she’s useful when Mom and Dad walk in the door. I’m just not sure when that’s gonna be, that’s all.”

“So speed, dammit!” Heero growled as Trowa twisted around in his seat to carefully edge out of his parking space. “That girl’s cooking is poison! If you want me to stay for dinner, you’ll get your ass in that kitchen before seven,” he ground out in a commanding tone, jerking his thumb at the digital clock built into the dashboard above the radio. “Or I’ll get out and just catch the bus there right now to do it myself.”

“Okay, okay, calm the storm, Heero,” Trowa said with a dry chuckle as he obeyed Heero’s suggestion to drive faster than the street signs denoted as legal. He knew that the Japanese boy was just trying to illustrate the urgency of the matter, despite his rather gruff means of doing so. After getting to know Heero as well as he did though, Trowa knew that it was just his stoic friend’s way and forgave him the character flaw, knowing he certainly had quite a few of his own that were probably equally as infuriating. He glanced up into the rearview mirror to catch either Quatre’s eye or that of his purple-haired friend. “Where am I heading?” he asked.

“Want to come with me to Milliardo’s house?” Noin asked her friend in the confidence of the cavernous trunk space. “He invited me to dinner at his place because my parents are going out tonight to celebrate their wedding anniversary or something. I’m sure his mother wouldn’t mind the extra company.”

“Okay, that sounds really good,” Quatre agreed, finding the notion of supper with Noin at the mercy of her boyfriend’s stellar cooking skills quite agreeable. The same old meals at one’s own house could get a bit boring a repetitive after a while, no matter how good they were and Quatre was always up for a change of pace. “I’ll just call home when we get there.”

“Nice,” Noin smiled, glad that Quatre seemed to be perking up a bit since the traumatic argument he had with his best friend earlier that day. “He lives on Cinque Lane,” she directed Trowa, leaning between the two front seats and making sure to avoid the shivering blue of Heero’s eyes as he watched her every move. “Just keep going straight until you hit Zeppelin Street and make a left.”

Trowa followed Noin’s excellent directions right down to number 6 Cinque Lane, the house with the spindly white veranda and green shutters. As they slowed in front of the house and Trowa was letting his two guests climb out of his jeep, the front door opened in greeting, apparently alerted by the sound of Trowa’s bitchy engine.

“Oh Heero!” a delighted high-pitched squeal bounced down the front walkway towards the little jeep entourage, followed by a girl with dark honey blonde hair, in tight, white jeans and a sky blue top. She might have been considered good looking, though the overuse of perfectly applied makeup took away from her natural beauty.

Quatre’s head snapped up at the sound, not even bothering to probe her life force with his Sense to get a reading on her personality and such. She was one of those that could be read like a book without a second glance. Definitely the kind that Duo hates the most, Quatre thought drolly to himself, admitting that while his braided friend was still a little pigheaded, he certainly had a very legit point about a good serving of the prep entrée. Ribbons in her hair, fake bouncy walk, too much makeup and a mouth full of smacking bubble gum…. Roger that, I’d say, dimwitted airhead confirmed. Definitely lives in a candy-coated world of her own.

But what had startled Quatre was the panicked and annoyed aura radiating off of Heero of all people, which suggested to the young mutant empath that the oriental boy had an uncanny talent for blocking his emotions and life energy for whatever reason. The unexpected readings from the stoic Japanese were gone almost as soon as Quatre had sensed them, suggesting that Heero only lost control of his emotions when he was caught off guard. Quatre had to admit he was duly impressed by the unchanging mask Heero continued to wear, despite the wavering of his aura, causing the blonde boy to wonder what could have happened to the mysterious Heero to make him so stiff and unwilling to make his sentiments known. A disturbing thought that perhaps Heero had no control over the lack of warmth in his life aura stung Quatre’s mind, though that flicker of emotion had been enough to comfort Quatre in his first guess that Heero was really a good person wrapped up in a steel shell. The past afternoon with him had started to get the Winner son second-guessing his initial impressions of Heero, though he was thankful that he could regress upon those doubts.

“Relena,” the Japanese boy growled out in as polite a salutation as he could muster. He took in a very forced breath of air in an effort to calm himself and asked, “Can I ask what you’re doing here?”

“Silly, this is my house!” she giggled, leaning on the door of the jeep and batting his arm playfully. “I didn’t know you would be bringing Lucy over,” she went on, gesturing loosely at Noin with a flick of her bracelet-clad wrist. “I would have dressed nicer if I had.”
Quatre was so ready to go and just smack the girl upside the head when another surprising jolt from Heero drew his attention away. But what astounded and stupefied Quatre most was that instead of just mere glimmers of emotion from Heero this time, he was getting all-out complete thoughts that could belong to none other than the messy-haired lacrosse player with shocking blue eyes. ‘Whatthefuckwhatthefuck,’ that low sexy growl of Heero Yuy’s looped through the mutated portion of Quatre’s brain that sharpened his sixth sense. ‘Shit Trowa, stop ogling the blonde’s ass and let’s ditch! Dammit, she’s breathing too much of my air! Friggin’ honky tonk woman, all sass, no class….’

Quatre found that last mental comment intriguing and furtively stole a glance over his shoulder; sure enough Trowa was standing behind him, whistling and looking just a bit too innocent with the way he seemed to be preoccupied with the sea gulls lining telephone wires running overhead as he rocked on his toes.

“I didn’t know I would be coming here either,” Heero drawled diplomatically, despite his ravenous thoughts, the strain to swallow the venom in his voice obvious to Quatre even without reading his thoughts. ‘And fuck me if I’ll be coming back! Goddammit, where was my head today? I should have known! Peacecraft! Milliardo Peacecraft!’

“Must be fate, don’t you think Heero?” she crooned, leaning forward in a way that made Heero lean back at least a foot to put some space between himself and the annoying girl plastered to the side of the jeep.

‘Hell no!’

“Oh, hello Lucy!” came a very pleasing deep whimsical voice from the open doorway of the house. Everyone outside turned to look at the new speaker, Quatre sniggering a little bit as he caught a stray prayer of thanks for the interruption slipping from the suddenly accessible world of Heero’s mind.

“Zechs!” Noin cried excitedly as her attractive longhaired boyfriend strolled down the brick path leading up to his home. She trotted over to him and gave him an affectionate hug around the neck as he lifted her off her feet and spun her about.
The use of the name drew the interest of both Heero and Trowa. Heero was quick to put a wall between him and the awful menace that was plaguing him for his affections to ask aloud, “So you are Zechs Marquise. I had not seen you beyond practice.”

“That’s his way of saying that he thinks your defense is amazing,” Trowa interpreted, stealing another glance at Quatre, finally admitting that he was stuck hard on the blonde boy. He took a brief pause to quirk an eyebrow at the young Winner, a little distraught by the strange way he noticed the slight boy staring at the dark haired boy in the jeep. “And I would have to…” he started out slowly pulling his gaze back to Noin’s tall boyfriend, trying to push Quatre and the direction of those large aquamarine eyes of his towards the back of his mind to be dealt with at another time. “…Would have to agree….”

“Oh I didn’t know you were on the lacrosse team, Milliardo!” Relena said with a bounce of glee, leaping thankfully away from the jeep in the direction of her taller stepbrother. After Relena’s biological father had died in an accident while he was abroad on business, her mother had married into the prestigious Peacecraft family. And though Miss Darlian’s (the name she carried from her past marriage) sudden elevation in society had done little to the kind personality she had always possessed, the new lifestyle had done horrors to her daughter, the already fast and fickle Relena.

Milliardo was blinking at them all with a very odd look scrawled across his tanned face. He turned to look at Noin with the same confused look before returning his crystal blue gaze to the general crowd, who had suddenly become stone silent at his lack of response. Then, without a single bud of warning, he bent over in amused laughter, his voice like a deep chime blowing in the wind. He looked up again and managed to choke out between chuckles, “I’m not on the lacrosse team, guys.”

“You’re… not?” Relena sounded disappointed that Milliardo had not taken a step in what she thought was the direction for happiness, her views on such matters beginning and ending with how popular one was in high school. It was no secret she was not very keen on her stepbrother’s more intellectual and traditional pursuits, such as his love of books and reading and his healthy hobby of writing. She was appalled to think that a Peacecraft could be satisfied with being no more than the chief editor of the school paper! At least she had gone to win the spot of school president with her best friend Catherine as her running mate and succeeded astonishingly well with her (rather hypocritical) promises of wanting to build peace and community within the student body. But with a reputation and a famous name like hers, it almost did not matter what she used as a marketing pitch in the elections, so long as she came out on top, never mind who she had to step on to get there. And at the end of the day, who was the one who got her parents’ praise? Milliardo, the lousy editor of the stupid school paper! Even her own birth mother seemed to show more interest and support in the minimal accomplishments of her stepbrother, achievements which, she was sure, would not win him anything more worthwhile than a poor-paying job as a freelance writer in the future.

“No, not me,” he confirmed, slapping his knee as if he had just heard the funniest joke of the year. He tried to pull a straight face as he explained, though every once in a while, that contented grin would reappear upon his shining candy pink lips. “A friend of mine who writes articles for the paper every now and then wanted to try out for the team to impress a certain lady. Didn’t quite have the, ah, how do I say this…credentials…?” he shrugged and went on with his story, “the credentials needed to sign up. Anyway, I did a favour for my friend by lending the use of my nickname ‘Zechs’ so that those lacking credentials would appear to be mine instead, which are more acceptable to the team than those of my friend. Guess it turned out alright then if you two are singing my praises.”

He smiled again, seeming to be oblivious to the myriad of reactions he was receiving to this clarification. Heero looked a little peeved to have been ‘deceived’ so, or so the somewhat lost Quatre read from his life energy, any words in his mind silenced once more. Trowa somehow managed to look perplexed and amused by the situation all at once, as did Noin, who gave her boyfriend a playful slap on the cheek. Relena just looked outright pissed, wondering just how many screws her brother had knocked loose and rolling around upstairs.

“Heh, and you let your friend use your dog as a last name?” Noin asked, her eyes roving the yard in search of the large, shaggy, white and gray mutt. “That’s just too funny!”
“I think so too,” Milliardo replied, his mouth drawn into an almost devilish smirk. Then he grew serious and added, “But don’t any of you go blabbing to anyone about this. If someone up in the cogs and gears of the school finds out, both my friend and I are toast.” He glared at his stepsister with a flicker of shadow dancing across his face. “That means you, little ‘Lena.”

Said girl scowled at the epithet, knowing her stepbrother had said it only to get her riled and embarrassed in front of the boy she sought to marry and her best friend’s twin brother. She clenched her fist unconsciously and returned the suspicious stare.
Meanwhile, Trowa had walked over to stand beside Quatre on the brick sidewalk that meandered in front of the Peacecraft home. Letting out a nervous gasp of air, he said as casually as he could, a hand shoved in each pocket, “So Quatre, what’s on the menu for tomorrow?”

“Oh,” Quatre’s face fell a little bit. “Well, I usually spend the weekend at Duo’s unless my parents are home, but I’m still not sure I’m ready to face him just yet before he’s had a few days to calm down.”

“So in other words, nothing,” Trowa assessed with a sideways look at Quatre, silently thankful that his long cinnamon hued bangs were shading the strange ruby blush that had stained his cheeks.

“In other words, yeah,” Quatre agreed with another one of his adorable and dazzling smiles, squinting his eyes closed merrily as he turned to look at Trowa in return.

“Heero’s got to go into school to finish up some extra work, so I won’t have anyone to hang out with. I’m always up for a little ‘Getting-to-Know-You’ type deal,” Trowa rambled, feeling way more than a little nervous now that he was up to his neck in this conversation with no way out even if he had wanted. “If you want, we could meet at Gifford’s and take a stroll down the boardwalk, maybe see a movie, have lunch or something. You know, do stuff that friends do.”

“That sounds great!” Quatre gushed elatedly, clapping his hands gleefully together. “How does eleven o’clock sound?”

“Eleven would be fine,” Trowa said, relieved that he had gotten past the hard part of asking Quatre on a sort-of-not-really date. Now all he had left to do was enjoy his new friend’s company and start on the road to a hopefully much more intimate relationship that went beyond just calling the blonde boy ‘Q’ or driving him to and from the beach.
“Hey, Trowa!” Heero shouted impatiently, giving the outside of his door a loud tinny 'bang' with the heel of his palm that sent Relena rocketing out of her skin. “If you’re quite finished, I want to eat sometime tonight, and preferably something edible.”

“Well, I guess I better go and quiet the screaming beast,” Trowa sighed with a shake of his head, giving Quatre a private smile of goodbye before he turned around. “Alright, alright, don’t get your spandex in a twist!” he shouted back as he rounded the car and climbed back into the driver’s seat. He started the jeep with a coughing sputter from the engine that sent Relena running for the safe cover of her home’s pristine lawn, much to Heero’s sadistic amusement.

“Thank you for the ride Trowa!” Quatre called cheerfully with a wave as the jeep pulled away from the curb and started down the quaint little street. “See you tomorrow!”
A hand slithered out of the driver’s side window to acknowledge the shouted parting and before long, the forest green jeep was gone. As soon as they were completely out of sight, Milliardo made a motion for his two guests and sister to follow him inside for dinner.
“I don’t think Heero liked you helping your friend cheat to get onto the team, Milliardo,” Relena commented morosely as they stepped into the cozy mulberry red-walled foyer of the house. “That was not a very honest thing to do.”

“Personally, I think he was less fond of her making a royal fuss over him, the poor guy,” Milliardo muttered quietly into Noin’s ear, nudging her to pass it on to Quatre, who fought hard to stifle a giggle when she told him her boyfriend’s comment. “Eh, what the hell,” Milliardo said in a louder voice for Relena’s benefit as he followed his sister to the kitchen, his guests in tow. “As long as they get to championships, who cares who or what got onto the team how and when?”

It was not long before the group of ravenous children was seated around the large round dining table in the enormous Peacecraft kitchen, enjoying a fine home cooked meal of lamb and various side dishes from the hands of Milliardo and his stepmother. Mrs. Darlian-Peacecraft proved to be a very sweet middle-aged lady with slightly graying dark blonde hair, despite her pretentious offspring, and was more than happy to add an extra place at her table for the unexpected Quatre. Milliardo and his stepmother spoke freely and animatedly with his beloved girlfriend and her companion about a host of topics ranging from school to everything each had done so far that weekend, including the roller coaster of a day that Quatre and Noin had shared together.

Relena stayed out of the conversation as much as she could, not fond of listening to her stepbrother rattle on and on in his wordy eloquent speech. She kept herself busy by leaning in a bored fashion on one elbow as she pushed her food around on her plate, making faces at Marquise, the huge, barking ball of fluff her brother kept as a pet. The mangy dog in question was at present curled underneath Quatre’s chair, nuzzling the boy’s ankles underneath his baggy khakis with his wet nose in search of sympathy food. It seemed able to sense, in that way that all dogs can, that the boy was a softhearted stranger who would crumple into his whims eventually.

“So Milliardo, why don’t you tell us who this friend of yours who you sneaked onto the lacrosse team is. Would either Noin or I know him?” Quatre asked later on as Mrs. Darlian-Peacecraft was just returning to the table with a large apple cobbler. “And who’s this lady friend he’s so desperate to please?”
Milliardo waved it off with an apologetic gesture of his large slender hand. “No, I’ve said too much already.”

“Aw, Zechsy,” Noin crooned in a tone that was meant to sound cute, and despite the fact that it was coming from an eighteen-year-old girl, it somehow did. “Come on and spill it.”
“Maybe I’ll tell you after graduation,” Milliardo decided firmly, handing his plate to his stepmother for a serving of apple cobbler, his attentions focused on the sugary dessert instead of his girlfriend.

Quatre shot a look at Noin, who just shrugged in response. He turned his eyes to the platinum haired youth beside her, who was accepting his dessert plate back from his mother, full of cobbler, tiny ebbs of proud slyness eddying around his body. Quatre closed his eyes for a moment and focused that secret place in his mind before reopening them and trying to dig a little deeper into Milliardo’s mind with his Sense to satisfy his growing curiosity. But just as he was starting to get a dim reading from the seemingly oblivious boy opposite him, he felt a strange clamp on his Sense. He looked up at Milliardo to see him shaking his head at him disapprovingly, amending it slightly with a quick glance in Relena’s direction. Though Quatre did not know if Milliardo was another one of his kind or not, he was not aware that even mutants could feel it when he used his Sense to prod into their minds. He was intrigued that Milliardo had been able to detect him and furthermore, had been able to block him from reading his thoughts. Quatre supposed he could understand the worry that Relena might notice something suspicious going on, he was pretty sure that the ability to be aware of his Sense was extremely, extremely rare and decided that Milliardo must have had his own reasons for keeping his mind off limits.

The two covered up the incident with common chitchat, which held a certain air of fake normalcy that only Noin was able to pick up on. Still, things went on smoothly enough, the only trouble for the rest of the evening being the task of dealing with Relena and her finicky attitudes towards just about everything there was to be finicky and have an attitude about.

After Relena had retreated to the confines of her bedroom for the night, Milliardo and his stepmother took their cue to start cleaning up the table and the kitchen. As they tooled about on their tasks, Noin, being rather familiar with the Peacecraft home due to her frequent visits, showed Quatre to a phone off in the front foyer of the house. He dialed home and requested that one of his sisters swing by with the car to pick him up. Noin waited with him on the front veranda in the chill night air, the two of them pushing the porch swing they were occupying back and forth with their toes. Milliardo joined them soon after, once he had finished with the dishes, somehow managing to squeeze himself onto the swinging bench with the other two occupants. The three of them quietly enjoyed each other’s company and the clear night sky, nestled warmly against each other in a cocoon of body heat that protected from the bitter January winds that billowed through the air as they waited for Quatre’s ride. The minutes ticked by like seconds and before Quatre knew it, his eldest sister, Iria, had pulled up in front of the house in a silver Mercedes sedan, ready to whisk him home for the night. Quatre pried himself reluctantly off the bench, shook Milliardo’s hand and thanked him for the meal and bent to give Noin a large hug of gratitude for helping him to smile when he was down.

As he was beginning to pull away from his purple-haired friend, she whispered into his ear in parting, “Oh, by the way Quatre, I do think your Trowa is very nice indeed.”

(x) X (x)

“Argh! Holy God! That plant is lethal!” Duo yelped, snapping his hand away from the large potted vegetation he kept in the back of the garage as it physically whipped at his wrist with one of its thorny vines. He cradled his stinging hand against his chest, glaring dangerously at the plant and its large orange rose-like blossoms. “One of these days, Audrey, one of these days,” he threatened the plant. “To the moon!”

“I bet old Audrey just misses Quatre,” Noin said from the passenger seat of Duo’s little black deuce coup, where she was helping Hilde install the dashboard apparatus for the new boosters they had rigged into the engine the day before. “He’s the only one who ever pays attention to her anyway.”

“I just wanted a friggin’ root beer from my refrigerator! Is that so hard?” Duo cried out, a quavering finger shaking in Audrey II’s direction. If Duo did not know any better, he could have sworn that damn plant was sniggering at him. Duo moodily turned his back on Audrey II and stuck his tongue out at it over his shoulder like a disgruntled kindergartner.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have blown up at Quatre yesterday, then,” Noin replied smoothly, not raising her eyes once from the dashboard as she spoke. “I think Audrey’s mad at you for being a prat.”

“Oh please! It’s a plant!” Duo groaned with a tinge of biting sarcasm on his tongue.

“Besides, Dorothy waters Audrey II almost as much as he does,” Duo argued, emphasizing the pronoun that took the place of Quatre’s name, still refusing to speak the blonde boy’s name aloud. He turned to glare at the plant again as he pronounced his next words bitterly as if addressing it. “So it’s not like no one else bothers to take care of you, you ungrateful lump of chlorophyll!”

“Quatre talks to her,” Dorothy commented as she flicked on the large vintage diner-style jukebox glowing luminously behind the sofa, next to an old drum kit and Duo’s collection of bass and rhythm guitars. She sat down again and immersed herself in a magazine she had been reading before, her eyes following the black inked print on the pages as the jukebox’s music started to waft out of the speakers Duo had installed in each corner of the garage. “I don’t care how good he says it is for plants to have company. I simply will not hold a conversation with a flower.”

“Well obviously talking to her does something or else she wouldn’t have scolded Duo,” Hilde put in, her voice still cheerful despite the moody air lingering in the shop that day. “Clearly she knows that Duo was being a prick to Quatre.”

“Shut up Hilde,” Duo snapped with a stomp of his booted foot. “You’re supposed to be on my side.”

“Hey, I’m not saying I agree with him! I feel the same way you do about most preps,” Hilde said in defense of herself, pausing to raise her hands up in surrender.

“Most preps?” Duo arched a quizzical eyebrow, his face dangerously cynical. “All preps, Hilde. All of them suck!”

“I’m just saying that if Quatre wants to be friends with one then he can go ahead. It’s his life and I’m not about to tell him how to live it,” Hilde finished, furrowing her brow as Duo’s ridiculous attitude finally managed to at last disgruntle the most obstinate of all three with him in the shop. She threw in another comment just for good measure with the intent of getting a rise out of the easily agitated Duo. “Besides, you shouldn’t generalize that all preps are bad. And you shouldn’t generalize that being on the lacrosse team automatically makes you preppy! It doesn’t matter what kind of things you do that makes somebody preppy, just how they act.”

“So?”

“So maybe Quatre’s friend isn’t a preppy lacrosse player!” Hilde snapped, dropping everything she was doing so she could concentrate on giving Duo a run for his money. Noin buried her forehead in her palm and shook her head in defeat.
“Well maybe he is!” Duo shouted, his ire bubbling to a point of no control. He burst into his misty form of swarming particles and zoomed back and forth across the room in dizzying circles before settling by the car, right in Hilde’s face. “Maybe you haven’t realized this, Miss Sparkplug, but people are generally not very accepting of mutants like us and personal experience has repeatedly found a good portion of those ignorant racists in the high and mighty prep crowd!”

“What about Noin?” Hilde snarled back, her hair getting a bit of a shock as a current of electricity crackled around her fingers, her annoyance climbing skyward. “She’s not a mutant and she’s one of your best friends!”

“She’s one of the few and, might I remind you, not a prep!” Duo practically screamed, his face pale and his large plum eyes bulging a bit. “Much as I love him, Quatre’s the product of a huge ass family with enough dough to keep him pretty well sheltered from the sorts of assholes that might hurt him! And even they had the sense to genetically engineer twenty-eight of Quatre’s twenty-nine sisters when they realized that both the natural births in that family produced mutants so they wouldn’t have to risk seeing their kids be the victims of all that hate! There are people who would go to great lengths to lure one of us out into public and harass us just because we’re different—more different than even the most rebellious kid is! Don’t think you understand what it’s like to be targeted like that because you don’t, Hilde. You just don’t!” And with that, a warbled scowl on his face and the soft dew of tears on his eyelashes, Duo sucked in a pained breath and spun around on his heel to let his little tirade sink in on the dumfounded Hilde.

Hilde looked like she was about to open her mouth to say something, but whether her words were going to be comfort or contradiction to Duo, no one ever found out, for Noin put a hand on Hilde’s shoulder and silently bade her to be silent with a subtle shake of her head. Hilde had not known Duo as long as Noin and the others had and, since she was a member of a younger class, had not had the chance to hear any of Duo’s once-in-a-blue-moon trips down memory lane to the troubled world of his childhood. As a young boy, Duo had actually been an orphaned street-rat. Even amongst his own gang of troublemakers and fellow urchins, he and the one other mutant of his gang had been the victims of merciless taunts about their unexplained powers, and were often excluded by certain members of the gang, despite the usefulness it had for stealing food. Duo would never forget the way the most bitter and hurtful remarks always came from the elitists of the crowd, the ones who thought they were the most deserving of everything and found that mutants were lower than even them, the very dregs of society. Even after he had been rescued from his dismal lifestyle and taken into a local church orphanage, he had been looked down upon by such people. Most families never wanted to keep him when they found out about the nature of his unknown genetics and those who didn’t mind always seemed to find Duo’s off-the-wall temper a bit of a problem.

So, resorting back to one of his old gang’s golden rules, “If it bites once, it’ll always bite again”, Duo had grown up with a bitter resentment against anyone who went through life acting like he or she deserved everything. He had always felt that there was a hell of lot that he deserved and never got, but he would never even dream of wearing on his sleeve and rubbing noses, palm upturned and waiting. And it seemed the youth of this horrible sort of crowd tended to spawn in the prep category, hence breeding Duo’s fair contempt for the cliquish and exclusive group. He knew there might be the one or two oddballs here and there who might not fit the prep mold exactly, but Duo was not about to take any chances. He refused to even bother with them. Duo had decided a long time ago that whatever he got out of life would be from his own hands and no one else’s. He would be damned if he let anyone walk all over him again just because he was different. Different was good, he always told himself to fuel him even when it seemed like he had hit rock bottom. Different was better, and he would die before he let anyone take away his uniqueness or tell him otherwise.

“Duo,” Noin said after a few moments of tense silence, “I really do think it’s admirable for you to worry so much about Quatre’s well-being. I know you look at him like a brother practically and you don’t want him to have to suffer through the shit you went through as a kid but even you have to admit that you can’t protect Quatre forever!” She paused for a moment, waiting for a reaction from Duo, but got nothing more than a slight twitch from the wispy chestnut tail of his braid, feathering out delicately from the black satin loop of slender ribbon tied in a floppy bow around the base of his magnificent plait. “I told him pretty much the same thing yesterday and even he agreed. But you should know, Duo,” she let her voice drop to almost a whisper as she went on, “you really shook Quatre up yesterday. He was really heartbroken…. And you of all people should have realized that with his Sense he feels emotions twenty times more intensely than the average shmuck.”

Though Noin could not see Duo’s softened expression through his back as she spoke, Dorothy was able to. She had been watching the whole exchange furtively from behind the leafs of her magazine, and she smiled that secret grin of hers when she saw Duo’s stormy violet irises calm to their usual gentle tides and returned to her reading. Dorothy had always been extremely good at reading people, despite the airy and cynical costume she usually paraded around with. All of her close friends agreed that if she had a Sense like Quatre’s, the results could be frightening. She was good at detecting such things as it was without the Sense and the idea that she could probe into someone’s thoughts was more than a little disturbing to all of them, no matter how joking they made it seem. She was something of an enigma to Duo and the others, each of them unsure of what to make of her. Even her shape-shifting mutation was pretty mysterious and strange, even among them. Duo in particular had been intrigued by Dorothy, and was curious to find out more about her.
At last, Duo unfolded his arms and let them hang at his sides, signaling that he was through being hostile. He said softly, “Is he going to come by today? I want… I need to say… I’m sorry.”

“Damn straight,” Dorothy muttered loud enough to greet Duo’s ears, a smirk still evident on her features, still paging through her magazine as if she was not paying them any mind, though Duo and the others were not fooled so easily by that ruse anymore.

“Well, to be honest, he’s not,” Noin said, glad that Duo was willing to be more accepting of Quatre’s choices, even if he was not willing to be fond of them. She decided to herself that it was alright if he did not and that what was important was that Duo was willing to let Quatre learn for himself. Duo turned around with a furrowed eyebrow and a confused look in his eye. Noin explained, “He was afraid to come over because he wasn’t sure what sort of mood you’d be in, which I don’t blame him at all for. Don’t worry though!” she added quickly when she saw the genuinely crestfallen expression that riddled Duo’s elfish features. “He said he just wanted to give you time to cool off. He should be okay by tomorrow. You know that your tiffs never really last that long, no matter how bad you go at it.”

“Yeah,” Duo sighed, drooping a little. He really just wanted to get forgiving Quatre off his chest before he thought about it too hard and changed his mind. Plus, all the overriding guilt that Dorothy, Noin and Hilde had heaped upon him in the span of the past twenty-four hours was giving him the driving need to flush it all out of his system. Thinking of an alternative, he strode over towards the refrigerator with every intention of getting that drink he had been questing after earlier, only to be smacked across the back of the hand by another one of Audrey II’s whippy vines. “Is it really so hard just to get a damn root beer around here!?” Duo howled in pain as he recoiled his hand in pain, licking the raw pink scrape. “That stupid plant is laughing at me, I swear!” He turned on his friends and complained, “Who’s stupid idea was it to keep that thing, anyway?”

“Yours, Duo. Yours,” Hilde said with a hopeless shake of her head as she and Noin returned to their work on the dashboard. “I think I remember you saying something about pretty flowers, cool shaped leaves and how you thought it was just so neat the way she seemed to have a personality all of her own.”

Duo pouted and jerkily turned around to glower at Audrey II, shaking his fist menacingly at it. “One of these days, Audrey, one of these days… To the moon!”

(x) X (x)

A/N: I think I used some Yiddish in there! Sorry if you don’t know what it means, though I think I used some common words! I just write what I think! Anyways, I hope no one got their hopes up ‘cause of the title, hehe. It’s a Rolling Stones record, of course... you know, the one that came with the panties...? And I hope some other people have picked up on the Audrey II thing. So far, I’ve only had one person latch onto it, hehe! ‘Neways, hope you liked the nice long chappy! Thanks for everyone who’s been so supportive of this and for the reviews! No bugging me for a while! Bleh!

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